Lake Toba

Located in the middle of the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, Lake Toba is a large natural lake occupying the caldera of a supervolcano. The lake is about 100 kilometres long, 30 kilometres wide, and up to 505 metres deep. The Samosir Island situated inside the lake is bigger than Singapore. Lake Toba is the site of a massive supervolcanic eruption estimated around 74000 years ago. It is the largest-known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, it had global consequences for human populations; it killed most humans living at that time and is believed to have created a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make-up of the human worldwide population to the present.